Memory is generally thought to be encoded in synapses in the brain (At Nintil I've linked in the past some papers against that). The latest in this debate is one that claims to have done memory transfer across snails by merely injecting RNA into neurons.

Featuring "the Octogon": Borrowing from the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the Cage of Adversarial Collaboration is a ring proponents of competing theories can only leave once they come up with a decisive, preregistered test, the result of which they vow to accept (the interocular trauma test is among the approved finishing moves). Following Max Planck, science advances one funeral at a time – this might speed things up.

Chime in with your problems and solutions in the comments. We might have enough material for a second post. Maybe next time some of the solutions might actually be real?

Progress Studies manifestos are popping up faster than one can read them!

Research evaluation: In some countries there are periodic reviews of academic output from universities, and this is used to guide budget allocations. In other countries, like Italy, an algorithm is used based on the impact factor of the journal relative to that of other journals in the area, and the relative citations the paper has received. Turns out that there is a high (R^2=0.9997!!) correlation between the budget allocation chosen by the algorithm vs that chosen by experts in the REF2014 assessment in the UK .

No. Academia didn’t change and science wasn’t saved. 200 years after Babbage’s book, academia remains the same, but worse: insecure employments; unhealthy hierarchies; unhealthy work-life balance; unwanted relocation to secure a position; administrative focus on quantity rather than quality; career development rather than scientific development; fear of sharing ideas, data and materials with colleagues; publish or perish. These are the things that make us employ questionable research practices. Academia might once have been created for the sake of science, but if so, that purpose was lost a very long time ago

I asked on twitter what the most efficient language is for information transmission. The one paper I was aware of that looks at this, which Gwern cites here finds that most languages are similar in information transmission, with the exception of Japanese, being worse.

Higher IQ (weakly) predicts libertarianism, a finding that has been replicated in the US, Brazil, and China, now also true in Denmark.

Apple invests in R&D as much as Spain (private+public ). I wonder in what exactly Apple spends that money.

In my post Fixing Science (Part 1) wondered how many problems are there in the natural sciences, after a brief examination, fake data seemed to be one of the common issues. Here's an example of that in the wild.

Lessons from the EA economic miracle. I haven't read much about industrial policy, but my baseline view is that it may have worked in the past, without implying that it can work now, less likely so in developed countries. Deserves more examination. Followup from the author

RCT in Mexico adds to the evidence that management practices matter, and that management consultants can help.

US standard of living has improved more than it would seem from GDP due to improper inflation adjusement.

Simon DeDeo attempts to point out a weakness in determining genetic causes of behavioural traits, fails. Why?

First, I don't know what this is supposed to be criticising, and if it's just a snarky remark or something serious. But if something serious, my best interpretation is that one can get ridiculous results from behavioural genetics using crappy methods. This is not news: One can reach arbitrary conclusions using crappy methods in whatever field.

A stronger implied argument is that most findings in the field are indeed crappy and that things like "genes that affect IQ/conscientiousness/linguistic ability?" are as bunk as the cantonese gene.

But even on this view, there are problems with the example. First, on a priori grounds, before looking at the concrete evidence, every complex behavioural trait that I am aware of is not mendelian (short of say, those that derive of sex, or certain illnesses perhaps). There is no gene for intelligence, or a gene that enables you to do complexity science. Second, we know there are non-native Cantonese speakers, and they most likely would not share the putative gene. If anything we would expect that if there is a spurious correlation between a trait and a gene, there are shared cultural factors behind (As discussed below in the chopsticks and tea examples); this would very unlikely be the case with a non-native speaker. So this example is quite bad to begin with.

What if we change the example slightly to make it better and say that there is a gene that makes you better at Cantonese (by a tiny amount), and that this gene is more prevalent among the native Cantonese population? Then it doesn't seem ridiculous! In fact, it could be true, a decade ago such genes were allegedly found (for tonal languages, not Cantonese in particular). In general, there is a research field trying to see if small, cross-population genetic differences that make some population more skilled at certain kinds of vocalizations can bias the evolution of the language (Which in turn leads to some interesting coevolution patterns). The point here being not that this is true, but that it can't be dismissed out of hand as silly.

In more practical terms, in twin studies, there are both monozygotic and dizygotic twins. For any given trait, for twins raised in the same environment, let's assume that both twins will speak the same language. Naively, if we have a sample of Western and Cantonese twins, it would seem like the language each pair of twins is perfectly correlated. Lo' and behold, it's genes! Not so quickly: If we assume that the correlation between both DZ and MZ twins is perfect (There is no pair of twins that speaks a different language) and we plug the numbers in the formulas to estimate heritability in the classical twin method we get that the effect of genes is zero! Of course! If the correlations do not change depending on the genetic similarity of the twins, it's unlikely that the trait under consideration has a genetic basis.

TLDR both in principle, and in practice, this is a confused thought experiment.

A better example or what the Cantonese tweet thread was trying to get at -causal identification is hard- is here, on "tea drinking genes", or this piece on "chopstick genes"